During the four months when Clarke was in Athens, Lord Elgin's
dilapidation of the Acropolis was gaining speed, and Clarke
was under the impression that his lordship's men were removing the marbles
to put in his house in Fifeshire: `under the
pretense of rescuing the arts from the hands of the Turks
they are pulling down temples that have withstood the injuries
of time and war and barbarism for ages, to adorn a miserable
Scotch villa', as he wrote to William Otter the day after his
arrival in Athens. Lucieri, he found, was not to blame `because he could
only obey the orders he had received, and
this he did with manifest reluctance: neither was there a
workman employed in the undertaking, among the artists sent
out of Rome for that purpose, who did not express his concern
that such havoc should have been deemed necessary, after the *moulds* and
*casts* had already been made of all the sculpture
which it was designed to remove'.
Lucieri was showing him round to see how the work was getting on
under his direction, when some workmen were engaged in preparing the removal
of the metopes by means of ropes and pulleys. The
disdar (governor) of the Acropolis had come to see the work, but with
dissatisfaction. Lucieri told Clarke that it was only
with great difficulty that the work could be carried out as the Turks were
very attached to the building which they had
grown to look at with religious veneration, and, indeed, had
built a mosque among the Greek remains. Clarke had not been
there long before one of the workmen came to tell Lucieri that
they were about to lower one of the metopes. They went to watch
the operation, and the metope was raised from its position
between the triglyphs, but as the men were trying to manoeuvre
it so that it could be lowered, part of the surrounding stone
was loosened, and a thundering mass of fine Pendeli marble
shattered into white fragments. It was a horrifying moment,
and the disdar made the most of it. He could no longer restrain
his emotions which had, in the Turkish fashion, been pent up,
and he actually took the pipe out of his mouth and managed to
let fall a tear. `*Telos*!' (`The end') he boomed and declared
that nothing could induce him to consent to any further
dilapidation of the building. Later, however, his pain was
mollified with the help of some money, and he offered no protest when some
of the finest pieces were removed from the
Parthenon, `Looking up, we saw with regret the gap that had
been made; which all the ambassadors of the earth with all the
sovereigns they represent ... will never again repair.'
Horrified as may have been, Clarke proceeded industriously
with his own little plans. Apart from collecting more than a thousand coins
and a number of vases, he acquired some marbles and then set to work to
achieve his master stroke.
This was the plan to carry away the great statue of the
basket-bearing Kistophoros (which Clarke supposed to be Ceres)
at Eleusis. Wheler had discovered this colossal statue in 1676,
and several ambassadors had unsuccessfully applied for its
removal. Clarke, who says he `found the goddess in a dunghill
buried up to her ears', was swift and efficient in his approach,
and with a bribe of an English telescope for the voivode of
Athens, he got a firman giving him permission to take it.
The Eleusinian peasants were alarmed at the prospect of losing
the statue which they believed gave fertility to their cornland,
but on 22 November (only twenty-five days after Clarke had
written so despondently on the island of Kea, seeing no roses
among the thorns) he was able to seize the prize. The village
priest, arrayed in his vestments, struck the first blow at the
rubbish with a pickaxe, and the removal of the half-buried figure had begun.
Clarke (whose previous experience in levitation had been launching a kitten
in a balloon when he was at Cambridge) had devised a machine which lifted
the
two-ton statue over the brow of the hill, and the Kistophoros
was down by the sea in nine hours. It was loaded, with other
marbles, on the merchantman *Princessa*, bound for England,
and now it reposes at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.